True to his word, the moment my friends finished writing their letters, Master Fatty Chunk returned.

  He had a massive pack slung over his back, thick straps cutting across his shoulders like it weighed nothing at all.

  “I’ve gotten more supplies,” he said. “We’ll be good for a year.”

  He looked at us. “Say your final goodbyes. Then we’re leaving.”

  Winnie crossed her arms. “You’re kind of an asshole,” she said. “You didn’t even ask if we wanted to go.”

  Master Fatty Chunk snorted. “Maybe I am. Maybe I didn’t. You’re still coming.” He looked her over. “I like dwarves. Straightforward. You always know exactly what you’re getting.”

  He paused, then continued, his voice level and unapologetic. “I want you to understand something, the lot of you. Life is unfair.”

  He gestured vaguely with one hand. “You won’t like this now. That’s fine. But this will prepare you for what life actually offers.”

  “I have power,” he said plainly. “If you want to make your own decisions instead of being forced into things by people stronger than you, then become stronger than them. It’s a simple matter.”

  “The strong rule,” he went on. “That doesn’t mean you need to be cruel.” He paused, then corrected himself. “In this case, I do. You’ll understand when you’re older.”

  I looked at him. “I understand why you think that,” I said. “But this is unreasonable at best.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Master Fatty Chunk replied. “It is what it is, and what it will be.”

  He glanced at us again. “If you have nothing else to say, we’re leaving.”

  We had already said our goodbyes.

  Clarice’s former master had pressed an archery manual into her hands, thick with notes and diagrams. Winnie hadn’t spoken much to her master at all. She had spent most of her time hunched over a table, writing to her family.

  Meka had written several letters in the time it took Winnie to finish one. Each had required more paper than the last, since she had to write large enough for minotaur eyes to read.

  She told me, quietly, that when she got the chance, she planned to introduce glasses to her family. They had never even considered them.

  The idea that something so simple could change someone’s life that much made me chuckle.

  I went to the counter.

  Luckily, it was Edith and not Brenda.

  “Are my packs ready?” I asked.

  She smiled and handed me a backpack. Medium-sized for a normal person. Large for me. “Everything’s in there,” she said.

  Then she reached under the counter and pulled out a small cage. Another cage sat beneath it, covered with a cloth. She lifted the cloth away.

  Inside were two very small hens.

  I smiled. “Thank you.”

  “How long until they start laying?” I asked.

  “About three months,” Edith said. “There’s enough feed for two years. One year for each of them. You could eat them now if you wanted. They’re perfectly fine.” She smiled brightly. “But if you want eggs, you’ll need to wait.”

  She tapped my pack. “And I packed you enough bananas for a year. Don’t worry about that.”

  I thanked her.

  I slung the backpack over my shoulders.

  The weight immediately toppled me forward.

  I hit the floor and realized, too late, that I hadn’t attuned to it yet.

  If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

  Master Fatty Chunk reached down, picked me up, picked up the backpack, and slung both of us with equal ease.

  Clarice, Meka, and Winnie fell in behind him as we left the guild hall and headed for the treeline beyond.

  While I hung over his shoulder, I cleared my throat. “So. Where are we going?”

  “I said a bronze zone, didn’t I?” Master Fatty Chunk replied. “Not right away. But that will be where you will spend most of your time training.”

  He adjusted his grip on me as if I weighed nothing at all. “Before that, I’m taking you lot to an iron zone. I want to see what you can do together.”

  My stomach tightened.

  “Similar to yesterday,” he continued, almost casually, “but this time I’m putting you in a boss fight. I want to see what your new ability can do.”

  He glanced at me sideways. “You know what it is?”

  “I have an idea,” I said.

  “Good,” he said immediately. “Very good.”

  We walked in silence for a few steps before a thought occurred to me.

  “How are you planning on letting Greta and Randall know where we are?” I asked.

  Without breaking stride, he said, “I’ll throw a rock through a window at the guild hall.”

  I blinked. “You'll what?”

  “Every morning,” he continued. “It’ll hit. They’ll know.”

  “That’s stupidly dangerous,” I said. “What if you hit somebody?”

  I did not bother questioning whether he could throw a rock that far. I had already accepted that he could.

  “I have very good aim,” Master Fatty Chunk said. “I don’t usually kill things I don’t want to kill. I also don’t usually harm things I don’t plan to harm.”

  “That’s not comforting,” I said.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he replied. “After the first few days, they’ll figure it out. They’ll stop repairing the window. Hell, they might even open it ahead of time.”

  He snorted softly, clearly amused by the thought.

  I could already imagine the chaos of those first mornings.

  Somehow, that worried me more than the iron ranked boss fight.

  Clarice walked with her hands laced behind her head, staring up at him as if she were studying a strange building.

  “Why are you so fat?” she asked casually.

  Master Fatty Chunk chuckled. “Because I’m half-ogre.”

  He said it like it was the most unremarkable thing in the world.

  That alone was strange. Ogres were not sapient races. They were monsters. Unlike ettins, who had two functioning minds, ogres barely had one. Intelligence was not part of their design.

  While it was not unheard of for ogres to have children with sapient races, it was rare, and the circumstances were almost never pleasant for anyone involved.

  None of that actually explained his girth.

  I eyed him suspiciously. “What’s the other half?”

  “Half-giant,” he said.

  That stopped me cold.

  Half-giants were rare on their own. A half-ogre, half-giant combination should have been functionally impossible.

  I did not really understand. He was far too small for that lineage. Physically, he should have been closer to twelve feet tall.

  “What’s the other half of the giant?” I asked, more carefully this time.

  Master Fatty Chunk laughed.

  “Dwarf.”

  That answer made my head spin.

  The man carrying me like a sack of potatoes was half-ogre, a quarter giant, and a quarter dwarf.

  And suddenly, his size made a disturbing kind of sense.

  “My ancestry is complicated,” Master Fatty Chunk said. “And not by choice.”

  He kept walking as he spoke, eyes forward, voice steady. “No one involved had any choice in the matter. I was bred for a gladiatorial pit. My forebears were slaves in an illicit ring, and I was the offspring made for combat.”

  He shrugged one shoulder, as casual as if he were talking about the weather. “They just didn’t realize how good I would become at fighting.”

  “The people who used to call themselves my masters died at my hands.”

  I stared at him. “Where in the world…” I swallowed. “Where slavery like that was even a thing?”

  “Ah,” he said. “You’re aware of Radavan’s law.”

  I was. Everyone was. The laws that supposedly ended slavery, ended breeding pits, ended gladiatorial rings built on sapient suffering.

  “You’re wondering how a slavery ring existed anyway,” Master Fatty Chunk continued, “let alone a breeding pit and a gladiatorial ring.”

  He lifted one massive hand, clenched it slowly, then opened it again.

  “That is why I say the world is unfair,” he said. “When people have enough power, they can do things that are not strictly considered legal to most of the world. Because who is going to stop them?”

  He glanced back at me. “You are the only one who can stop injustice that befalls you.”

  “Even if it requires you to ask others for help,” he went on, “that is still you stopping it.”

  “I stopped it with my fists,” he said. “With my elbows. With my head. And with my girth.”

  His voice did not rise. It did not need to.

  “I will teach you to do the same,” Master Fatty Chunk said. “Because a friend of mine asked me to take on a true apprentice. And if looking after you means looking after them as well, then so be it.”

  He jerked his head back toward Clarice, Meka, and Winnie, who were walking a short distance behind us, quiet now, listening to every word.

  “Who is your friend?” Winnie asked.

  Master Fatty Chunk looked back over his shoulder with one eye. “Erdale Watersong,” he said. “Guildmaster of the Adventurers’ Guild.”

  Erdale was alive.

  The name hit me harder than I expected. Erdale was not just the current guildmaster. He was one of the founders.

  Five hundred years ago, when I had been asked to help build what I thought would become the Adventurers’ Guild, Erdale had been there from the beginning. Back then, it had been sold to me as a safeguard, a way to protect people who chose a dangerous life, not a machine designed to grind them up and monetize the results.

  Erdale had been the only founder I remembered as genuinely well intentioned. He had wanted a guild that helped adventurers survive. He had wanted structure, training, and accountability. He had not been the sharpest of the group, and because of that, he had been the easiest to mislead.

  Or so I had thought.

  Maybe he had figured it out eventually, and that was why the guild, in this day and age, was so much better than it had any right to be.”